UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in the Postcolonial City

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This article explores relationship between gender and urban space within context of communal and ethnic strife in Bombay. It extends feminist responses to crises, as well as takes issues with these theories' assumptions regarding feminist subjectivities. The article concludes with a reading of a literary text, Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence, as an instance of a thoughtful artistic response to ruptures within women's private and political identities precipitated by postcolonial urbanism. The modern projects of anti-colonialism and nationalism have been remarkably patriarchal in orientation, in which often the question of 'new woman' was ... formulated ... as a question of coping with change (Chatterjee 1993, 135). Since mid-nineteenth century, new requirements of life in Indian city, where ideas of emancipation and modernity were rife, and where men's own sense of self as rational and urbane actors was tied to an ability to disentangle themselves from rural and backward origins, made urban space a concentrated site for theorizing citizenship vis a vis question of gender. The promise of Westernization and modernity, as well as nationalism and postcolonial citizenship (always in tension with former), continues to be rewritten in contemporary India, in which urban woman remains a problem for representation of posteolonial Indian subjectivity. Like most ex-colonized countries, India's cities grew and expanded simultaneously with consolidation of British colonial rule, often at cost of Indian countryside, which witnessed a continuous decline under British rule (that lasted until 1947), and continues to do so in posteolonial India. Triggered also by events such as partition of India in 1947, famines and other natural disasters, Indian cities have been stretched to their limits in terms of population and resources, and have come to represent uneven development of India's political economy. With economic liberalization unleashed in 1990s after decades of semi-socialist, state-controlled economic policies, unevenness has become more visible than before.2 The poor, women and immigrants are This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:17:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms